"Rolling Power Outages" Affect Many
By: Shelby Levins
Updated: February 2, 2011
MIDLAND/ODESSA -- Oncor is announcing "rolling blackouts" or "load shedding" that could affect your power.
It’s likely you will lose electric power more than once today for between 5 and 15 minutes.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, (ERCOT) has ordered ALL electric utilities in the state to shed some of the electrical load.
“We Carefully select feeders (lines that run into neighborhoods) to shut off. These are not randomly chosen. This is through the entire ERCOT system. Oncor covers 1/3 of the state. Oncor serves as many as seven (7)million customers. No critical care customers, hospitals, or first responders will be selected," Jeamy Molina, as spokesperson for Oncor, said.
The planned outages may have to continue tonight and tomorrow as we don’t see much improvement in temperatures, although it’s possible the utilities might be able to buy more generating capacity from western states that have not been affected by this cold weather.
It’s a combination of intense cold which is not only creating record electric usage for this time of year, but it can also slow the flow of natural gas that powers many of the generating plants throughout the state.
Natural gas has water vapor in it, and even though power plants get an extra-refined supply of natural gas, in these bitter cold temperatures, even a minuscule amount of water vapor can compromise the flow of gas through the regulators.
To help out, you're asked to turn off all unnecessary lights and appliances to save as much power as possible.
